The newly-developed UV lamps have many advantages over the traditional lamps.Existing commercial vacuum UV lamps are bulky, expensive, use excess power, have short lifetimes and contain toxic gasses that can pollute the environment and harm people.

Due to the presence of solid-state phosphor made from a thin film of KMgF3, the new lamp doesn’t have those issues.

The Japanese researchers are continuing their work on these lamps in a bid to make new innovations become more promising.

“Our lamp is a promising light source in terms of lifetime, size, heat conduction and stability. It has the potential to be an excellent alternate light source to low-pressure mercury lamps, excimer lamps and deuterium lamps,” said lead researcher Shingo Ono of the Nagoya Institute of Technology in Japan.